Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

Michigan woman describes torture, abuse from husband — and the day she killed him

In a fall, 2018 file photo,Tina Talbot, with her arm in a cast, gestures to well-wishers during a hearing in Waterford's 51st District Court last year, while still in custody for her husband's death. (Photo: Aileen Wingblad, The Oakland Press/AP)

Both of her lungs were partially collapsed, her spleen was ruptured, her ribs and an arm were broken, but Tina Talbot managed to hold the gun steady just long enough to pull the trigger once, and then a second time.

Moments later, her husband, Milosz Szczepanowicz, was dead in a chair on the patio of their Waterford home.

In an exclusive interview with the Free Press from the state's only women's prison, Talbot recounted the violent, four-day-long tirade that led to the Sept. 14 shooting death of her husband.

She recalled decades of Szczepanowicz's abusive behavior, her husband's threats on her life and the life of their special needs son, and spoke about the swell of support she has received since she was incarcerated in April. More than 60,000 people have signed a Change.org petition to urge Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to grant her clemency and pardon.

In a fall, 2018 file photo,Tina Talbot, with her arm in a cast, gestures to well-wishers during a hearing in Waterford's 51st District Court last year, while still in custody for her husband's death. (Photo: Aileen Wingblad, The Oakland Press/AP)

Hers is a story that brings to question whether people who've suffered domestic violence should be prosecuted and incarcerated when they kill their abusers, and who pays the heftiest price when violence begets violence.

"When Tina Talbot gets out of prison, she will be a convicted felon, which will bring another set of consequences to this tragedy," said Kelle Lynn, who runs an advocacy organization called Justice Thru Storytelling, which works to free battered women in prison in Michigan. "She may be free on the outside of those prison walls, but her life will still be traumatized. ...

"There are many more women like Tina Talbot. ... These women pose no threat to society. There is a double injustice these women can’t seem to get away from until we make progress with our lawmakers, prosecutors, and judges."

Talbot said she has met many of them at Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility near Ann Arbor, where she's serving 20 months to 15 years after pleading guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter..

"There are so many women I’ve run into here who are in the same situation as me," said Talbot. "I feel really bad that I got what I did and they are in here for 4 years, 15 years, 25 years, life.

"I just want to know, how is this helping? I went from a situation where I was a prisoner in my own home and now I am a prisoner again.

"I went from one controlling situation to another controlling situation. ... Prison guards will yell at me and I’ll cry, and my bunkmate is like, you’ve got to toughen up. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to leave here a hardened, changed person."

Trouble from the start

It all began in the mid-1990s in Grand Rapids.

Talbot was studying art education and history at Calvin College. She wanted to be an art teacher when she graduated. Szczepanowicz, who immigrated to the United States from Poland as a child, was a student at Davenport University.

They met at a bar.

"We went out a couple times," she said. "Then we were inseparable."

The following summer, Talbot got a job back home in Clarkston, where she lived with her parents, Susan and Joseph Talbot.

Szczepanowicz came for a surprise visit one day, but instead of a joyous reunion, Talbot remembered that her boyfriend was demanding, tempestuous.

"Milosz gave me an ultimatum," she said. "He said, 'You come back with me or we’re through.' He stormed off, squealed his tires.

"At that point, my parents were like, 'If he is this bad-tempered and controlling in front of your parents, what else is he going to do to you when we aren’t around?' But I didn’t heed their advice.

"I packed up and moved out to Grand Rapids."

Susan Talbot said she knew from the start that her daughter's relationship with Szczepanowicz was trouble.

Tina Talbot as seen in her Michigan Department of Corrections booking mugshot.(Photo: Michigan Department of Corrections)

The beatings began in 1996, Tina Talbot said, in the apartment they shared in Grand Rapids. She called police afterward, but declined to follow through on charges because she was embarrassed to show officers the bruises on her buttocks.

"Through our relationship, my best way to deal with him was to shut down and not talk to him," she said. "And then, he would always turn it around on me. He'd say, 'You forced me to do it. Why didn’t you back down?" It was always, 'You created the situation that made me do what I did.' "

The abuse continued to escalate, she said.

"He would break the things that meant anything to me," Talbot said. "He shattered my glass table with a flashlight. He tortured my cat. ... I asked him, "Why are you hurting her? Why are you doing this?' He said, 'It’s because you love her and she loves you and it bothers me that you treat her better than you treat me.' "

But still, she stayed.

"You go into a relationship and you want it to work," she said. "There were good times. There were happy times when he was generous, loving and giving, but there was always a threat: If you ever cheated on me, I would kill you and I would kill him. If you ever left me, I would take out your parents, your sister, your friends. You could get a PPO, but that wouldn’t stop me. I never forgive, and I never forget.

"If he ever felt somebody had wronged him, he would do anything to get revenge. There were certain people I told, 'If I don’t show up for work tomorrow, something’s wrong. You need to question it.' "

A surprise pregnancy

Talbot, now 52, hadn't planned to have children. Her pregnancy was a huge surprise.

"I call him my miracle baby," Talbot said of their son, Phillip. He was due on her 45th birthday, March 6, 2011, but he arrived a few weeks early.

Szczepanowicz wasn't happy.

"He wanted me to abort him," Talbot said. "He scheduled an appointment to get an abortion, and the day of, I refused to go. After that, he told me it was my decision to have Phillip, and so therefore I was going to have to pay for that decision."

She gave her son her last name, Talbot.

Phillip Talbot hugs his mother, Tina Talbot.(Photo: Janene Staley)

Just a few months after she became a mother, Talbot cut ties with her own parents.

"I told my mom and dad I’m not going to come see you anymore," she explained. "He had threatened to hurt my parents and I told them I don’t want him to hurt you."

Susan Talbot said she'd given her daughter the phone number to HAVEN, a domestic violence shelter in Oakland County.

"I tried to get her to get help," Susan Talbot said. "But I knew the only way she could get away from him ever was if he was dead. ... He was the type that would follow her anywhere and stalk her and do her in.

"The fact that she endured all that for all that time, and he ostracized her from her family. She saw friends, but only a few on rare occasions. And she went through beatings and chokings and, you know, ... she’s a good girl. She’s a sweet girl and she’s a strong girl, which helps."

She also was the family's breadwinner, working at a local credit union all day, and coming home afterward to cook, clean and take care of Phillip.

Szczepanowicz hadn't worked in years, mostly because of his violent outbursts, said Talbot's childhood friend, Janene Staley.

"Because of his temper, because of his violent nature, he could not hold a job," Staley said. "He hadn’t been able to hold a job since 2006.

"He would get into it with his managers. He beat people up that he worked with. He has a huge record of violence. Huge. And it just got to the point where he couldn’t be employed anymore. It was on record that he kept being fired because of his temperament."

So instead, he took care of Phillip while she was at work. Yet, Talbot said, it's unclear what Szczepanowicz did to actually care for the boy.

"Most days, he wouldn’t get up until noon, 1 p.m., and Phillip would be just sitting there on his iPad," Talbot said.

Tina Talbot kisses her son, Phillip, who has autism and is nonverbal.(Photo: Janene Staley)

Though he might not have given their son much attention, Talbot said, she didn't think Szczepanowicz abused Phillip.

"I looked at Phillip every night ... for marks. If there was abuse, I did not see it. He always said that if he ever got to the point where he started hitting Phillip, he wouldn’t be able to stop because he knew that’s how it was with me."

When he was 5, Phillip was enrolled in the Waterford School District, but that didn't last long.

Phillip's teachers were showing the boy, who still didn't speak, how to communicate using sign language, Staley said. That infuriated Szczepanowicz.

"Well, Tina’s husband, went up and asked, who did they think they were, he did not give them any permission to teach him sign language. ... Things got so out of control at Waterford Schools, they had to get a PPO out on him, and if he stepped foot on a Waterford schools campus, the schools went immediately into lockdown and police were called to remove him from the property."

Talbot tried to homeschool him instead — after work and on the weekends, which took a toll.

"I had to work all day, feed Phillip, school Phillip, bathe Phillip and put him to bed," she said. "Then feed Milosz, and clean the house, and then Milosz would get hungry again about 2 in the morning, so he would yell at me to get up and make him a meal.

"I would go to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning, and I would get up at 7. I would get ready for work downstairs so I wouldn’t wake him up."

Because if she woke him up as she got ready for work, "there would be hell to pay," she said.

More anger, more violence

He told Talbot on the evening of Sept. 9, 2018, that he would no longer care for Phillip when she was at work.

The following day, she said, she took Phillip with her to work, and explained the situation to her boss.

"I said, 'You are aware that my husband used to take care of Phillip. He said he won’t anymore and I don’t have child care.' I said, 'I want to get him into school, get him diagnosed.'

"They gave me 30 days of leave. I took Phillip and we went home. Milosz woke up when we got home, and he was very angry. He didn’t know where we went, and he was upset."

Szczepanowicz, she said, was using steroids as part of a weightlifting regimen, and the drug made him angrier, more violent.

He began to beat her and kick her. He picked up a wooden chair, and held it over her head. Talbot raised her right arm to protect her face, and he smashed the chair on her, breaking her arm.

She begged to go to the hospital.

"He picks up the gun and he’s like, 'Go in the kitchen,' Talbot said. "And he says, 'Sit down at the table.' He pours me a big glass of wine, and he says, 'Drink this. You need to tell them a story. You need to tell them you fell. You were drunk and you fell.'

"He sat there with his arms folded with the gun, watching me."

She drank the wine, and soon after they were headed to Huron Valley-Sinai Hospital in Commerce Township. Phillip was in the back seat when Szczepanowicz dropped her off at the door of the emergency room with instructions to call him when she was done.

Talbot said she told doctors and nurses the story they'd rehearsed at home: She was drunk and she fell. They splinted her arm and told her to follow up with an orthopedic doctor.

When Szczepanowicz returned to the hospital to pick her up, he was still raging. She said her husband hit her again, this time badly enough to cause a nosebleed even before they even left the parking lot of the hospital.

Her lawyer, Jerome Sabbota, said much of Talbot's story can be corroborated by her injuries and other evidence. Police found the broken chair she said Szczepanowicz used to break her arm. Hospital security video cameras also got footage of the abuse in the parking lot, he said.

Talbot detailed the continued attacks in the days that followed, explaining that in addition to the beatings, Szczepanowicz repeatedly raped her and threatened her life as well.

At first, he suggested he would make her death look like a suicide.

"And then he started to describe all the ways he was going to kill me," Talbot said. "This is when he first started talking about hurting Phillip. He said, 'He’s about as useless to me as you are. I question if he is even mine. I am going to be done with the both of you. I’m going to go on the run. I am going to slit your son’s throat from ear to ear and let his blood drip all over you so that is the last thing you see before you die.' "

He threatened to kill them both and then call police so they could kill him in a so-called suicide by cop.

"At one point, he got the tool bag out, and he got out his pliers and he says, 'I’m going to do Gestapo stuff on you. What do you think about me pulling your fingernails off with these pliers and pouring salt in the wounds? Or taking these wire cutters and cutting off the ends of your fingers?' "

This time, Phillip didn't escape the violence, either.

He'd gotten too close to Szczepanowicz's weights, she said, so her husband picked the boy up by his shirt collar and dropped him onto the floor. Phillip hit his head and began to exhibit symptoms of a concussion.

Szczepanowicz refused to take him to the hospital, Talbot said, so she did her best to care for her son while also nursing her own wounds.

It was getting harder and harder for her to breathe. She would later learn that was because both of her lungs were partially collapsed. And the pain from all the bruises and broken bones was growing unbearable.

Frightening promise

By the morning of Friday, Sept. 14, there were bills to pay and errands to run. Szczepanowicz wouldn't leave his wife and son home alone, so they all went to Walmart and to pay the water bill, she said.

In the parking lot of the township water department, he told Talbot that she and her son were going to die on that warm and sunny day.

She believed him.

Then, out of the blue, Szczepanowicz gave her a chance to get away, though it came with a warning:

"You can take Phillip and run," she said he told her as they sat in the car outside the township offices. "But you know if you do that, there’s no going back. I might get locked up for a while. You might get a PPO (personal protection order), but you can’t stop me. I will always be one step behind you."

She didn't move from the passenger seat.

"I just sit there," she said. "I’m thinking, 'where am I going to go where he isn’t going to find me?' He drives us home, and the whole way, I’m thinking, 'what can I possibly say to change his mind? He is going to do this. He kept saying today is the day.' "

Her lucky break, if you can call it lucky, happened later that morning, when she was in the bathroom after they returned home.

"I heard him put the gun down on top of the fridge. He walks up to Phillip, hands him his iPad and says, 'Goodbye, son.'

"I am frantic because I was like, this is it. This is when he is finally going to kill us."

Szczepanowicz left the room, she said, and opened the door that led out to a cement-slab patio.

"I pick up the gun and follow him," Talbot said.

As she approached Szczepanowicz, she gave this account of what happened next:

Tina Talbot’s injuries are photographed on Sept. 14, 2018, the day she was arrested in the fatal shooting of her husband, Milosz Szczepanowicz. This Waterford Police photo was provided to the Free Press by her friend, Janene Staley.(Photo: Waterford Police Department)

He told her: " 'You need to think about this very carefully. Either you are going to shoot me or I am going to take that gun and kill you. You’ve got five seconds.' He starts counting: 'One, two, three.'

"He starts to rise up when he gets to three. He looked away from me for a split second, and that’s when I shot.

Talbot's mother recalled what went through her mind when she saw the police at her door later that day.

"Right away, I thought it was Tina that was dead," Susan Talbot said. "We always thought that. We always thought that would be her."

Even though she hadn't seen Phillip since he was about 6 months old, Susan Talbot and her husband, Joseph Talbot, went to pick him up.

"The poor kid didn’t know what was going on," she said. "He didn’t know who we were."

She took a suitcase of Phillip's things and brought him to Clarkston while police brought Talbot in for questioning.

"We have had him ever since," Susan Talbot said. "She went through beatings and chokings and … you know, ever since Phillip has been here, sometimes, I wonder if he saw stuff and that’s why he’s not talking."

Criminal charges

What happened next shocked Talbot's friends, family and domestic violence advocates who say she acted in self-defense.

Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper's office charged Talbot with open murder and felony firearm possession in the death of Szczepanowicz.

"It was complicated politically," Talbot said. "The prosecutor is a voted-in position. They were getting a lot of people contacting them. They didn’t want to deal with it anymore, but they didn’t drop it, either.

"There was a lot of people who said, 'why aren’t they going to drop the charges?' " Talbot said. "They had to make an example out of me."

Tina Talbot looks to her attorney, Jerome Sabbota, as Oakland County Sheriff's deputies put her in handcuffs to escort her out of an Oakland County courtroom after she is sentenced on April 4, 2019. Talbot was sentenced to 20-months-15 years for the shooting death of her husband, Milosz Szczepanowicz.(Photo: Aileen Wingblad, The Oakland Press/AP)

Sabbota, Talbot's lawyer, explained that if her case went to trial, a jury could find in her favor and acquit her, but it also could come back with a conviction of first-degree or second-degree murder or manslaughter.

"If the jury returned a verdict of first-degree murder, it’s mandatory life (in prison)," Sabbota said. "If the jury returned a verdict of second-degree murder, the guidelines start at 18 years and went up to about 25 years at a minimum range."

It was too risky for Talbot, who wanted to minimize her time away from Phillip.

"Sometimes juries don’t understand the nature of domestic violence, how they play you, how they threaten your friends, your family, your pets and your neighbors," she said.

"I was not willing to roll the roulette wheel. That’s when I decided to make the plea deal."

Talbot pleaded guilty in late March to manslaughter and put her future in the hands of Oakland County Circuit Judge Martha Anderson.

Holly Rosen, a licensed social worker and the director of the Michigan Sate University Safe Place, a domestic violence and stalking program, independently evaluated Talbot and issued a report to the court.

In her conclusions, she wrote:

"I strongly believe a rational person would have acted in a similar way to defend themselves. ... Ms. Talbot was faced with a no-win situation; was acting in self-defense to protect herself and the life of her 7-year-old son, Phillip; and it is very likely that she and her son would not be alive today had she not acted in the way that she did.

"It is my professional opinion that her intent was solely to spare herself and her son from harm, and that she did not desire for her husband's life to end in this way, or at all."

At Talbot's sentencing hearing in April, Anderson said there was no doubt she'd been abused.

"The injuries that this defendant suffered that particular week of a broken arm, broken ribs, lacerated spleen, collapsed lungs, bruising throughout the body is not something the court can discount with respect to her actions," Anderson said.

"Were there other ways to resolve what the situation was? It's easy to say yes. There's always divorce, separation. But I also understand that with victims of abuse, that there is fear that even if you leave, your abuser will find you, continue to haunt you and may even kill you."

Sabbota asked Anderson for mercy, and requested probation, not prison time for Talbot.

"This lady does not need any kind of jail or incarceration," Sabbota said. "She is not a criminal. She was really a victim. She could not stand toe-to-toe with this guy. She’s maybe 130, 135 pounds and 5-foot-6. He was 6-foot-1, 256 pounds and he was a weightlifter. She couldn’t fight him. She tried in their relationship, and that didn’t resolve really well."

Anderson wasn't that lenient.

She ordered Talbot to serve 20 months to 15 years in prison and to pay $32,510.70 in restitution.

"Ms. Talbot was severely abused in this relationship," Anderson said, "but the taking of another life is still a crime, and that has to be accounted for."

Talbot's mother was devastated.

"I was in shock," Susan Talbot said. "Everybody was upset, and everybody was bawling. We thought she’d get probation and community service. Judge Anderson couldn’t have done a worse thing."

Talbot had a feeling she wouldn't get off without prison time.

Her mother-in-law, Teresa Szczepanowicz, had stood before the court minutes earlier and refuted allegations that her son was abusive. She described her son as a loving and kind man, who had served in the Marines before college and who adored his son.

"Instead of divorce or some other nonviolent choices, she murdered my son," Teresa Szczepanowicz said of Talbot. She suggesting that if Milosz Szczepanowicz had been abusive, he should have been prosecuted instead of killed.

"I ask for justice for my son," she said. "I ask for the highest punishment."

Staley said there was never any question her friend was a battered woman.

"She would — I mean all the time — she’d have a black eye, she’d have hand marks on her arms, you know marks on her legs. And she had been confronted, not just by me, but by numerous people and most of the time, she would just deny it, and say, 'Oh, I fell again. Oh, I was wrestling to Phillip, and he just so happened to kick my eye and that’s why I have a black eye.' Unfortunately, nobody knew what to do. Nobody.

"It is a very hard thing."

Early release sought

Soon after the sentence was delivered, Talbot's allies rallied to her side.

Staley started a Change.org petition to get her supporters to put pressure on Gov. Whitmer to grant clemency and issue a pardon for Tina.

"Ms. Talbot acted in self-defense amid a barrage of near-lethal assaults by her abuser," said Jacobsen, whose work has led to clemency for 13 Michigan women who were given life sentences in killings tied to their abuse. "Miraculously, she survived and did not become another statistic in the long list of women who are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in Michigan each year: 1 every 6 days."

Lynn, of Justice Thru Storytelling, agreed.

"Tina Talbot was in a kill-or-be-killed situation with intimate partner violence and chose to save her life and the life of her son," Lynn said. "She didn’t have other options available to her. ... Women are being killed at alarming rates by their own intimate partner, when the woman fights back and her abuser ends up dead, she is victimized again in our court system and sent to prison."

The Oakland County Prosecutor's Office did not return several calls seeking comment on this case, why it pursued an open murder charge against Talbot or whether it would oppose clemency or a gubernatorial pardon.

Judge Anderson declined to speak to the Free Press about Talbot's sentence, but said through a spokesman that she wouldn't oppose an early release from prison for Talbot.

Gov. Whitmer's spokeswoman, Tiffany Brown, suggested in a message to the Free Press that a discussion about a pardon for Talbot is premature.

"The Governor’s Office has not received a pardon application for Ms. Talbot. All requests for clemency are reviewed on a case-by-case basis," Brown said in an email.

Talbot's friend, Staley, said she is working now to shore up the application for a pardon, but she wants to be sure it's done right. Under state rules, clemency applications may be filed only once every two years. And if it is rejected, she won't be able to apply again on Talbot's behalf until 2021.

"There have been abundant efforts to secure the right attorney to represent Tina on the clemency issue — but with no funds and laws that work against domestic violence victims — it’s a tall order," she said.

"Still, behind the scenes, her supporters have been speaking with lawyers who have deep experience on this issue who can work with us pro bono. We believe we are on the right track and are in communication with what we believe is a fit worthy of helping us —but all of the details are not yet solidified.

"However, please let us be clear, we have every intention to pursue clemency. We believe the attorneys we are speaking with have the knowledge, expertise and intellectual capacity to help Tina and her young son — both who were systematically abused by the one person who should have loved, cared for and protected them."

A survivor

Talbot isn't getting her hopes up.

"The minute I get too excited is the minute it doesn’t happen," she said. "I have to get through the next 20 months. This doesn’t mean I am not appreciative of what they’re doing, but I can’t get excited."

The earliest date she could be released from prison is Nov. 13, 2020. But it's the longer end of her sentence that worries her.

She knows she also could be stuck in prison until 2034 — and by then her son will be a man.

It has been nearly two months since she has seen Phillip, who is now 8. He hasn't gotten clearance yet to come to the prison to visit her. Talbot said she worries how he'll react, whether he'll remember her, whether he'll be OK.

“That is probably the hardest part," she said. "Before this happened, I had never been separated from Phillip for even a day. It’s hard."

Although he still doesn't speak, she said, "he is very affectionate and loves hugs, loves kisses. ... He finds ways of communicating. He is the best nonverbal communicator I’ve ever seen in my life."

She lifted her hair to reveal Phillip's name tattooed on the back of her neck.

"I knew if I got locked up, I wanted him with me. He is my reason for all this," she said as tears slipped down her cheeks. "I am OK until I talk about Phillip, and then I get choked up.

"I feel everyone has a path. They are supposed to take in life. Although I wouldn’t pick this path if I had foresight, I have Phillip. I am so blessed.

"He is in a stable, loving home now with my parents. ... I struggle with feeling like sometimes because I am in here and I am away from him, that I did him a disservice. He doesn’t have a dad, and now he doesn’t have a mom.

Although it's not easy adjusting to life in prison, where she's in a unit with 52 other women that's on lockdown 23 out of 24 hours a day, Talbot is managing.

"I am OK in here. ... I am a survivor. I have survived worse, so I can survive this. My main focus is doing what I need to do and stay out of trouble so I can get back to Phillip."